ConsenSys Partners With Black Girls Code For National Blockchain Training Program

Oakland natives Belle Reader, age 12, and Cadence Patrick, age 15 attending DevCon with support from the Ethereum Foundation, ConsenSys and Black Girls Code

Black Girls Code/ConsenSys

Black Girls Code, a non-for-profit focused on increasing the number of women of color in technology fields by providing technical training to girls from the age of 7 to 17 has partnered with ConsenSys to establish the first blockchain training program of national scale for young women of color.

The program will be scaled out to all of Black Girls Code's chapters, from Oakland, New York City, Atlanta and all the way to Johannesburg, South Africa as well. It will include a holistic, comprehensive blockchain curriculum that includes lessons about cryptocurrency, solving for user experience problems, and the fundamentals of blockchain technology. The course aims to become a gateway and an introduction to the blockchain ecosystem.

It's not just a theoretical curriculum either: the partnership with ConsenSys lets students bring their ideas into practice by participating in some of the top blockchain developer conferences in the world, from DevCon to Ethereal.

There will also be sponsorships for in-program hackathons for the students in the program. It's not just ConsenSys that is able to help either: the program helps to highlight and support exceptional students that the blockchain community-at-large can support.

The Ethereum Foundation, for example, sponsored two program students to go to DevCon 4 in Prague. The two girls, Oakland natives Belle Reader (age 12) and Cadence Patrick (age 15) were the youngest attendees at the conference and were the first to be awarded Ethereum Foundation scholarships in its four-year history.

Belle and Cadence started off knowing about as much about bitcoin as the average layperson -- next to nearly nothing. It would have been prohibitive for them to gain knowledge from a workshop billing at thousands of dollars, or events that can easily retail for hundreds of dollars if not more. Thanks to the support of this program, both are now immersed in the blockchain ecosystem.

Black Girls Code used its own token to motivate students through a curriculum where they would learn how to make their own smart contracts and cryptocurrencies. Since August 2018, almost 60 young women of color were introduced to blockchain basics (from Solidity development to aspects of cryptocurrency philosophy) through the program, and both partners are looking to scale it up to hundreds more for the new year.

"The ConsenSys team has consistently impressed me with their commitment to creating pathways for access and inclusion within the blockchain ecosystem and their passion for introducing these tools to the next generation of coders,” said Kimberly Bryant, Black Girls Code’s CEO. “Our BGC tech divas have embraced blockchain technology with vigor and are excited by its potential to create equity and impact on a global scale. This partnership is an extremely important addition to an already vibrant ecosystem which will flourish by this influx of fresh ideas, perspectives, and insights."

This new collaborative Blockchain course also hopes to bring new partners in the cryptocurrency community onboard. They are already collaborating with partners like the Ethereum Community Fund, the Human Rights Foundation, and the Ethereum Foundation to help spur the initial growth they've found so far --and the sky is the limit given the right resources and the right partners.

Black Girls Code is ultimately looking to grow to train one million girls by 2040, and is looking to become the "Girl Scouts" of technology. With this bold step into the blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystem, the program ensures that minorities and underrepresented groups in both technology and cryptocurrency get early exposure to the field -- and it helps keep important partners in the cryptocurrency space invested in the success of those same groups.